For patients experiencing adverse events during a hospital stay, intervention often comes too late, which can result in any or all of: extended hospital stays, high readmission rates, unexpected crashes, reactive/crisis-response medicine, worse outcomes, higher costs, and hard-to-review patient cases. This is a significant problem in the healthcare industry, as approximately one third of patients experience adverse events during their hospital stays. Some causes of sudden patient deterioration include, for instance: bleeding (e.g., undetected bleeding, hemorrhage, etc.), sepsis, heart failure, pneumonia, trauma, a brain condition (e.g., traumatic brain injury, stroke, etc.), respiratory failure, hemodynamic decomposition, cardiogenic shock, cardiac arrest, pain, arrhythmias, infection, level of consciousness, and combinations of these.
Eighty-five percent of severe adverse events are preceded, however, by abnormal, underlying physiological signs; being able to respond to these early warning signs reduces mortality by seventy-five percent and associated costs by forty-percent. Current practices for monitoring patient health (spot-checked vital signs, physical exams, and lab tests) and the metrics involved (e.g., arterial blood pressure, heart rate, arterial hemoglobin oxygen saturation, etc.) do not enable such early detection. First, these practices involve inconsistent, incorrect, and infrequent measurements, as well as intermittent and blind gaps between measurements. Second, taking/recording these measurements is a manual process and requires action from a healthcare provider, such as nurse. Third, and perhaps most limiting, is that the human body has impressive compensatory systems, which often shield these underlying physiological signs from current methods of detection, resulting in late intervention. Real-world physiologic signal quality and morphology can be affected by a host of factors, including but not limited to: comorbidities (e.g., arrhythmia heart defects), background noise, lead placement, patient movement, medications (e.g., beta blockers, vasopressors), palliative care patients (e.g., highly medicated patients will have stable vital signs due to high levels of sedation/stabilizing drugs; patient physiology is highly altered and does not resemble that of deteriorating patients), other interventions (e.g., fluids, ventilator, etc.), or other factors.
Thus, there is a need in the biosignals field to create a new and useful system and method for detecting patient instabilities sooner and more reliably (given real-world data).